


Memores Acti, Prudentes Futuri

by guileheroine



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Friendship/Love, Life Partners, Post-Canon, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 20:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10474254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guileheroine/pseuds/guileheroine
Summary: Roy Mustang reflects on his long history with his Lieutenant, and where the years bring them.(A ramble on Royai/love letter to their dynamic; prose without plot.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> just my feelios on paper  
> ([on tumblr](http://guileheroine.tumblr.com/post/158907544963/memores-acti-prudentes-futuri-roy-mustang))

 

 

 

> _across the city there's a golden chill_  
>  _a rare holding still_  
>  _as if somebody's gonna sing_  
>  _a dip in tempo for the castanet shoes_  
>  _no blues and twos_  
>  _as if somebody's gonna sing_  
>  _we glide, w_ _e spin_  
>  _you end and I begin_  
>  _i made this mess for you_  
>  _to sift through for all time_  
>  _you're glowing from within_  
>  _beneath an autumn sky_  
>  _we find our rhyming stride_  
>  _and head for supplies_

By day he was divining the perplexities of alchemy and by evening (or morning walk, or lunch break, or menial compensatory chore in this house that would remain dreary no matter what he scrubbed it with) he was divining his master’s daughter. The latter was proving infinitely more elusive, and she wasn’t even a fraction as volatile.

 

Stern, immutable, _predictable_. She should have been boring.

 

The first time she spoke to him, she was bleeding before him on the creaky wooden step below the front door. She cradled her knee as the bag in the crook of her elbow continued to slip further down. The door frame framed her - she was very in his way; and for once she couldn’t scamper out it. (He wasn’t sure if she was just shy, or it was this roof that made her this way. He resolved to find out.)

 

“Um,” Roy said, cleared his dry throat. Then she could no longer pretend not to see him. His palms were open at his sides as he blinked on the verge of a step forward. “Are - are you alright?”

 

“I fell over on the path,” she answered matter-of-factly, like she had planned to do it. Only the twitch of her lip betrayed any sign of the pain that must have been great enough for her to remain immobilised, where he had doubt she would rather have walked quietly off.

 

So it sort of felt like cheating on a transmutation test, when he sat down on the step right below hers, knowing full well he was cornering her when she was helpless to play her usual move.

 

She simply stared into the cut on her knee. He didn’t have the option to stare her down.

 

“Is Master Hawkeye ready to see me?” He ventured, instantly feeling silly. How would she know? She had evidently just gotten home, and she couldn’t well go up and find out; and he would seem a great deal stupider than her father might have told her if she thought he was asking her to.

The first glare Riza Hawkeye would ever give him relayed exactly this. It was sharp, it cut. It was more than he had ever worked out of her, and immediately his curiosity overcame his sheepishness.

 

He peered into her knee, too; and she pulled her shoulder back a microscopic amount to signal her assent to his gesture. It was a shallow wound, but ugly, and the air was making it uglier.

 

“I don’t know any healing alchemy,” Roy said apologetically.

 

“It’s alright,” she said quietly, but not curtly. The absence of any curtness intrigued him further, her had expected it that much. After a moment she took a shallow breath and said in an inquisitive lilt, “What can you do?”

 

“Write lines,” Roy said with a hint of bitterness.

 

That earned him a spark in her eye. Roy could read it easily, he didn’t have to hear her reply to know it.

 

“Me too,” she said shyly.

 

“Master Hawkeye says you’re amazing in school,” he offered.

 

Riza shrugged, flexing her knee experimentally. “Well, it’s a good school. He made sure.” Her tongue stuck out and her eyes sharpened, like she could stare her leg into functioning properly.

 

Suddenly an idea struck him. He reached for his satchel, pulling out a flask of water and several creased sheets of paper before his fist emerged with a fraying bandage tucked in it. He presented it to her and she scrutinised it, then him, somewhat meekly.

 

“I hurt myself sometimes when I’m practicing,” he explained, “only a little bit!”

 

She let him dab at her knee with water from the flask before tying the strip of padded gauze around it, wincing silently only once or twice. By the time he was done her attention had drifted from her injury. Roy looked from her massive, round eyes to the sheet from his bag on which they lay. It was scrawled over with transmutation circles.

 

She was scrutinising this, too, but it was different - wistful. Quickly Roy snatched it away. They were embarrassing, unconfident renderings, not a perfect circle among them.

 

“Wait! Can you show me?” Riza stopped him. It was, again, the most forward she had been with him, and the simple fact made Roy agree. It was either going to impress her - and if not, well, at least his acquiescence might encourage her to try being forthright more often.

 

He turned the sheet in his hand over and fished a pencil out before drawing carefully and slowly. Then he concentrated very hard, and when he lifted his hands off it, the paper curled inwards and up from the centre into a thin shard of metal. It lay in the circle between their limbs, where they had bowed closer around it as if exchanging a secret.

 

“Wow - you can-” Riza whispered at the unimpressive splinter, stopping short like her breath had been stolen. Had she spoken any louder it might have toppled like a pin.

 

Roy tsked. “It’s not efficient.” He pinched the metal away and shook the sheet off. “I want to transmute fire.”

 

Her eyes widened, and for a moment she looked as hesitant as any other day. “You should show me - if you learn how to do that.” He understood that she was telling him she’d be discreet. Her expression turned vaguely regretful again. “I wish I could learn alchemy.”

 

“Really?” Roy blurted. She didn’t strike him as the type. “Why?”

 

“Well, why did you want to be an alchemist?”

 

The answer that was usually automatic to his lips took a moment to come when she asked so plainly for it. “To protect -  to help our people.”

 

Riza gave him another stare, more open and knowing than any before, and he found himself wishing he could meet her somewhere other than her father’s house.

 

-

 

He never saw her bleed in the war, though most of her was torn out thoughtlessly and mangled.  

 

As it turned out, fire _was_ their secret, and in sharing it they made their grave mistake. It scorched to ashes both of their dreaming hearts and many things more innocent still, as fire was wont to.

 

It no longer impressed her. It did worse than the opposite. And only the tremble in her jaw betrayed her repulsion.

 

The second time he saw Riza bleed was the only time he made her bleed. She wouldn’t force his hand, but Roy knew he was helpless to decline her request. It felt like he was breaking his back just to muster the will to lay a finger on hers, although he knew it already bore far worse than the scars he would leave her with. Would always bear a weight unfathomable - he was helpless to erase the worst of it.

 

“Alright - Lieutenant Colonel,” she said shakily, mouth adjusting to his new title, and his own ears adjusted to it, too.

 

When she presented him with her back for the second time, he considered how this instance was a direct consequence of the first; drew a long, bitter line from a day many years ago to now as he surveyed the intricate lines. He wished he had never pursued these perplexities. Had stuck to the one they now crept over like a canvas, so straight and precise they might have been beautiful if they weren’t so dreadful. He located the most familiar lines, those which also marked his gloves. The array was still pristine. More so than in his mind, in his memory - it was almost a shame to mar it, even as the sight made him nauseous.

 

After all, its damage was done; the two of them its fated, ill-fated purveyors. This wasn’t really a preventative measure, or even a mitigative one. It was an afterthought.

 

But if it shaved a chip off her burden he would do it.

 

Riza had a painfully simple, simply painful plan. She would sit with a cushion of cloth between her teeth, he would do it, and when he was certain that the wounds were sealed he would leave. She would make her way to the East City Hospital in the morning and claim a freak domestic accident.

 

It bled very little. He made it quick and pinpoint, channelling her own deadly aim in his mind, so that the nerve endings would numb as swiftly as possible. She made very little sound, having numbed quicker from the inside out. He marveled at her composure until he realised it was no marvel at all - it seemed as though her very lifeblood had run dry, flesh already mutated, skin turned steel under his fingers. She had hardened - it only took him this long to notice how deep the dread had penetrated.

 

He hadn’t done it now, but that was still his doing in some way, he knew that. The first time he had burned her was not this, but the first time he had ever burned an innocent body. And every next body - his or hers, was the simply the following link in this heavy chain that now shrouded her skin, made it unfeeling.

 

It was both of their doings. They were in this hell together. They had created it, wreathed out of flames their own private prison.

 

At least they were in here together.

 

And fire was hard to stamp out.

 

Theirs had scorched a world into a wasteland and left it in their wake. But that wasn’t the only stubborn fire they had shared; and in the ashes of childish dreams there remained a scant few embers.

 

Their shape had changed, irreversibly - but whilst the devastation, to which they had done far worse than borne witness, had annihilated the idealism of those dreams, it had sharpened other parts.

 

It sharpened his sight of the world, such that he could draw up from the ashes his vision of the future, and discern it with an eye keener than ever. Her aim with a rifle was already perfect, but now a deeper purpose was in piercing focus.

 

_If the world truly operates on the principles of equivalent exchange, then we soldiers have plenty to give back. If this world is meant to prosper then it is our duty to carry the bodies of the dead across a river of blood to their resting place._

 

He was in total agreement, and he knew that he didn’t have to tell her that for her to know it. They were going to play the long game.

 

When it was done, she whispered, “Thank you,” through clenched teeth. He washed his hands, though no blood came off, hers or anybody else’s.

 

A week later in the East City headquarters, he asked how her wound was, and knew from the tight press of her lips that he wasn’t supposed to. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Colonel.” Well, he knew that code: his sticking around the issue wasn’t part of her plan that evening, and it wasn’t part of their one now, because hereafter they only looked forward.

 

She was constant.

 

Her resolution compounded his own, tethered him to the world and their cause (one and the same); her oath sanctioned him to act, even if they had no power to sanctify one another.

 

He wondered if he would ever again witness that spark in her eyes. That was the only fire he wanted to share.

 

The years granted his wish, as the signs of life flowed back into the parts of them both that weren’t blackened. It became nothing special to see her bleed - minor injuries sustained on the job (rare though they were), papercuts; the one time Jean scared Hayate and he nipped too hard.

 

Until one day it wasn’t.

 

-

 

After Bradley scattered his men, the absence sensitised him to every minute shift in her countenance when they crossed paths. When they moved as a team, he had had little opportunity or need to simply observe. Here, observe was the only thing they could do together.

 

So he observed her. Now that his constant was not so constant he was taking not only intelligence from these liaisons but whatever he could of simply her presence; siphoning what he could in twenty short minutes and tucking it in corners of his mind for later. Bradley knew what he was doing - her captivity gave him leverage, was a real impediment - but he couldn’t know that that was no more an impediment than the mere reality of separation, of configuring their manoeuvres and machinations without his lieutenant. It slowed him down. Losing her felt like losing a limb - in the most practical sense, yes, but otherwise, too: wherever their quest led, they were supposed to go together.

 

The thin laceration along her pale cheek was not healing. It looked as raw as it had yesterday when she had relayed to him her chilling news regarding Selim Bradley. It had raised in him yet more concerns about the tangled web of intrigue an atrocity that spun outward from the heart of the military; about its culmination, the imminent upheaval that he sensed would strike Central City, if they were lucky, but more likely the whole of Amestris.

But the anxiety that had resounded first and deepest was for Lieutenant Hawkeye. Why did she know what she knew? How did the knowledge befall her? What had stolen her characteristic calm over the line the other day? Why was she bleeding?

 

It was coming very soon, the critical point they had worked for, and they had prepared long - but they couldn’t be _ready_ if they were apart. Soon it would be imperative to act fast together, to whatever end. Which meant soon, he would have all his answers, or no need for answers at all.

 

“It’s deep,” Roy commented casually. He averted his eyes from her injury to his tray before she could meet them.

 

“Sir?” She said, but she knew his meaning almost as soon as she had spoken. “Oh. Yes.”

 

The cut nearly bled through the flimsy dressing - he could see a fresh drop bead as she chewed her bagel; and she winced slightly when she swallowed. The set in her jaw reminded him of the first time, when she had scraped her knee.

 

He wondered how to voice his concern without saying too much. He didn’t figure it out before their twenty minutes were up.

 

Before he knew it, the Promised Day was upon them, and he understood, when Hawkeye approached him before Hughes’ grave, that for all their deliberation there was something they had neglected to design out.

 

What if the long game got cut short?

 

The possibility was real. The possibility, he accepted, but he wished they had time to work out the details - wondered, as they exchanged a final glance before the dawn, if he could accept the means to a bloody end.

 

-

 

When the zero hour finally came, he learnt to regret being impatient for it.

 

No instance could have prepared him for the blow that the gold-toothed doctor dealt. He saw the blood bloom like fire before his eyes. She suffered just once more for his sake; and in the sharp, blistering second before his eyes blurred where all he saw was her blood he remembered knowing one thing; and it shot frantically, messily to the fore of his consciousness like the spray from her wound.

 

They were supposed to go together.

 

That was the final, unspoken element of the plan.

 

This was not part of the plan.

 

She had betrayed it herself hours ago, and whilst hearing the words burned more than her bullet would have, he had known the plain truth of it already; felt it echo in his own heart now.

 

_I have no intention of carrying on by myself._

 

He could no nothing but shout. Hawkeye lay motionless. The doctor’s taunts seemed inconsequential, faraway, over the rush of blood in his ears (and if it weren’t for that he might have thought his own body was draining) - but he was holding that glimmering Stone up, making his torture so much worse that he could hardly imagine what hers felt like. And all the while the blood poured like sand from an hourglass (all those years and still, they were out of time); and he really was _helpless_ this time, helpless to halt it, _freefalling_ -

 

Until she caught him.

 

His ragged breath caught.

 

He knew that code.

 

-

 

When he saw nothing, he saw blood. He woke from an uneasy slumber with the image of her on the cold floor behind his eyelids, as if his vision hadn’t disappeared so much as stopped short on that one foul image.  

 

He wished he could wash it out of his useless eyes. He needed his sight back for a great many things, but none more than that he had to see her, not dying, not bleeding, not stumbling on her feet.

 

The morning that Doctor Marcoh released him from his care the sun was blaring in Central City, as if to welcome him back. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from its glare (a strangely satisfying sensation) and discerned the back of her in the plaza on his way to their old office. She was talking to Fuery and as he found her she sent him on his away.

 

Even half a courtyard away she shone like a beacon in the light, a stern, straight figure capped with glinting gold.

 

He found himself running. “Lieutenant!”

 

He could pinpoint the millisecond the understanding filtered into her head. Her back stiffened in that familiar way, and even though he couldn’t see her face he could see it: big eyes wide, a momentary leap of the brow. Her hand curled at her side. If he could call for her from the distance that she heard his voice at, it meant  -

 

He stopped when she turned, a handful of paces away.

 

She had told him earlier that her brace was gone, but it seemed like all debility had disappeared with it. His eyes flew straight to her neck, and before the old image could flash he absorbed this one. Clean wrappings peeked from under the collar of her black turtleneck. She stood on solid feet and blinked, raising her hands before her. He saw them tremble with energy.

 

“Lieutenant,” he repeated.

 

In answer she drew forward into his arms. He didn’t know what to do with his own - he was wary of her injury - but he settled them over her back. Released an exhale that felt laborious, overdue.

 

She stepped back and he said, “It’s good to see you.”

 

Hawkeye laughed lowly. Instead of drawing her hands back to her side, she lifted one and placed it against his jaw. It drew his eyes straight back into hers; and he realised, when he had managed to direct his thought away from the warm sensation, that that was its purpose.

 

“And you, Colonel,” she said warmly.

 

A passerby might have thought that they had little to say, and they would be right: they had little to say to one another when nobody’s eyes were out of commission.

 

“I see you’re very happy to be giving orders in my absence. But I have to admit, I’ve got much else to thank you for.”

 

In her face he read relief, gratitude, admiration, the hint of sardonic admonishment. And something not new, but newly pronounced, which he recognised because it coursed through his own self, would have shown on his face: a deep, undammed affection.

 

But she smiled, and for now “Tell me later, Sir,” was all she said.

 

They were playing the long game, after all.

 


End file.
